Why MYSTERIES? Because that is the genre I read. Why PARADISE? Because that is where I live.
Among other things, this blog, the result of a 2008 New Year's resolution, will act as a record of books that I've read, and random thoughts.

Often regarded as her most interesting book and set on New Zealand's North Island, Ngaio Marsh herself considered this to be her best-written novel.

It was a horrible death -- Maurice Questing was lured into a pool of boiling mud and left there to die. Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn, far from home on a wartime quest for German agents, knew that any number of people could have killed him: the English exiles he'd hated, the New Zealanders he'd despised or the Maoris he'd insulted. Even the spies he'd thwarted -- if he wasn't a spy himself...

Published in 1943 this was #12 in Ngaio Marsh's already very successful Roderick Alleyn series.

More recently the Ngaio Marsh award, established in 2010 for the best in New Zealand crime fiction, has ensured her name will be perpetuated.